Restless Creatures: The Story of Life in Ten Movements, Matt Wilkinson (Icon 2016)

A fascinating book about a fascinating thing: the movement of plants and animals. It’s also a very familiar thing, but it’s far more complex than we often realize. Human beings have been watching horses gallop for thousands of years, but until the nineteenth century no-one was sure what was happening:

The man usually credited for ushering in the modern study of locomotion is the brilliant photographer Eadweard Muybridge. […] His locomotory calling came in 1872, when railroad tycoon and former California governor Leland Stanford invited him to his stock farm in Palo Alto, supposedly to settle a $25,000 bet that a horse periodically becomes airborne when galloping. (ch. 1, “Just Put One Foot in Front of Another”, pg. 16)

To answer the question, Muybridge used a series of still cameras triggered by trip-wires. And yes, galloping horses do become airborne: “not when the legs were at full stretch, as many had supposed, but when the forelimbs and hindlimbs were at their closest approach.” However, Matt Wilkinson calls another man “the true founding father of the science of locomotion”: the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, who had been investigating movement using a stylograph. In fact, it was Marey who first proved that galloping horses become airborne (ch. 1, pg. 19). Muybridge’s photographs were dramatic confirmation and the two men began to collaborate.

Marey also pioneered electromyography, or the recording of the electrical impulses generated by moving muscles. Like the rest of modern science, biokinesiology, as the study of animal movement might be called, depends on instruments that supplement or enhance our fallible senses. It also depends on mathematics: there is a lot of physics in this book. You can’t understand walking, flying or swimming without it. Walking is the most mundane, but also in some ways the most interesting, at least in its human form. Bipedalism isn’t an everyday word, but it’s an everyday sight.

What does it involve? How did it evolve? And how important was it in making us human? Wilkinson looks at all these questions and you’ll suddenly start seeing your legs and feet in a different way. What wonders of bioengineering they are! And what a lot of things happen in the simple process of “just putting one foot in front of another”. Scientists still don’t understand these things properly: for example, they can’t say whether or not sport shoes are dangerous, “lulling us into a false sense of security, causing us to pass dreadful shocks up our legs and spine without our being aware of them” (ch. 1, pg. 29).

But there’s much more here than horse and human locomotion: Wilkinson discusses everything from eels, whales, pterodactyls, bats and cheetahs to amoebas, annelid worms, fruit-flies, zombified ants and the “gliding seed of the Javan cucumber Alsomitra macrocarpa”. He also discusses the nervous systems, genes and evolution behind all those different kinds of movement. This book is both fascinating and fun, but I have one criticism: its prose doesn’t always move as lightly and gracefully as some of its subjects do. Wilkinson mentions both Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. I wish he’d written more like the latter and less like the former. If he had, a good book would have become even better.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth: A Scientific Exploration into the Heart of Our Planet, David Whitehouse (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2015)

Can you touch anywhere on your body with your right hand? Replying quickly, you might say you can. But what about your right elbow? You can’t touch that with your right hand. Science is like that, because distant things are often easier to study and understand than close things. We have a good understanding of how stars work, for example, but not of how the earth’s magnetic field is generated.

And while we’ve been able to predict solar eclipses for millennia, we still can’t predict earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. Understanding the deep earth is difficult, so there are a lot of mysteries and conjectures in this well-written and compelling book about the interior of our home planet. Scientists have landed probes on Mars, millions of kilometres away, but the “deepest hole ever drilled on earth – the Kola Superdeep borehole in northern Russia” reached only 12,262 metres. That’s a mere pinprick by comparison with the radius of the earth. To get beyond that, scientists have had to study the shockwaves generated by earthquakes. The medium is the message: as the waves pass through or hit different regions and materials, they behave in different ways.

For example, when the Croatian scientist Andrija Mohorovičić (1857-1936) “studied the records from several seismometers” after an earthquake near Zagreb, “he realised that some of the shockwaves […] were being reflected back to the surface from a boundary region between the crust and mantle.” (pg. 82 of the 2016 paperback) The region is now called the Mohorovičić discontinuity. But that discovery was made before the First World War and deep geology hasn’t advanced very much in the intervening century. This book borrows the title of a Jules Verne novel published in 1864. If Verne came back to life, he would be pleased to see that his work is still popular, but he would be disappointed to see that the human race was no nearer reaching the centre of the earth.

Or would he? The American geologist Don Anderson says: “Almost everything known or inferred about the inner core from seismology or indirect inference is controversial.” (pg. 211) Deep geology is a difficult science, but that’s part of what makes it so interesting. Something else that makes it interesting is that the inner earth can visit catastrophes on the outer earth and the film of the life that clings there:

The big question is: can we see mass extinction events on the way up? Some scientists believe that we can by looking for the plumes [i.e., giant plumes of rising magma]. Such a thing is seen in the south-west Pacific near the Fiji Tonga subduction zone. It’s 700 km deep, has a structure consistent with a massive temperature anomaly and may be rising. It could render the earth uninhabitable for humans and it will reach the surface in an estimated 200 million years. (ch. 17, “Plumes”, pg. 146)

Asteroid impact and gamma-ray bursts are not the only catastrophes that threaten the continued existence of the human race. They may not even be the most likely. The film of life on the surface of the earth is fragile and one day it won’t be there any more.

But there’s also life deep inside the earth, living in conditions of extreme pressure, heat and darkness. We still know little about this “deep biosphere” and it may hold some big surprises. The rest of the deep earth almost certainly does. And the deep earth is just the beginning: as Whitehouse describes in chapter 26, there are “Other Worlds, Other Journeys” to come, including the even more extreme conditions at the heart of Jupiter, where the temperature is a “staggering 37,000 degrees C” and the pressure is “over ten times that found at the centre of the Earth.” (pg. 239)

Or so scientists estimate. Will scanners be invented to prove their theories? Will probes ever get there and find out for real? We can hope so. In the meantime, this book is an excellent introduction to the ideas, the pioneers and the modern researchers into mysteries that are right beneath our doorsteps. Whether it’s discussing diamonds, demons or “Double-D-Prime”, Journey to the Centre of the Earth is popular science that’s interesting, entertaining and informative all at once.

British Butterflies: A History in Books, David Dunbar (The British Library 2012)

This isn’t a book about British butterflies, but a book about books about British butterflies. There have been a lot of them and David Dunbar does a good job of providing a comprehensive guide for collectors. He begins with the Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum (1634), the Theatre of Insects or Tiny Animals, which is based on a manuscript by Thomas Moffet. Was Moffet the father of Miss Muffet of nursery-rhyme fame? Maybe. He was certainly a pioneer of British entomology and “the original Latin edition of Insectorum Theatrum must be regarded as the cornerstone of any collection of early entomological books”.

If you want that cornerstone, you’ll have to be rich: it was listed for £4,141.72 at Abe Books in 2016. I would be happy with a facsimile myself. I used to own a facsimile of perhaps the most famous book discussed here: Moses Harris’s The Aurelian (1766). Dunbar discusses the original, mentions the facsimile, and reproduces some of Harris’s beautiful illustrations showing butterflies and moths with their food plants. He explains the book’s puzzling title too: “Aurelian” is an old word for a lepidopterist and comes from Latin aurum, “gold”, referring to gold spots or colours on a chrysalis (from Greek khrysos, “gold”). The metamorphosis of lepidoptera from ugly or strange larva to inert chrysalis to light-winged adult is a large part of their appeal. Lepidoptera can be like flying flowers and have attracted artists for millennia.

For example, Hieronymus Bosch gave “the wings of meadow browns and small tortoiseshells” to demons in his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490). There’s nothing as strange as that here, but there are a lot of illustrations: almost every page has something attractive or interesting to look at, as Dunbar traces butterfly books from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. He discusses artists like F.W. Frohawk (1861-1946) and scientists like E.B. Ford (1901-88), but he concentrates on bibliography, not biography. You’ll have to look elsewhere to learn that butterfly-fanciers have a lot in common with orchid-fanciers: they can be strange and obsessive people.

But then butterflies are Ballardian: they combine beauty with strangeness. On page 111 you’ll find the beauty in the colours and patterns of the Large Heath buttery; on page 110 you’ll find the strangeness in a series of “line drawings of butterfly genitalia” from The Genitalia of the British Rhopaloceraand Larger Moths (1941).

The genitalia look like spiky seed-pods or torture instruments for aliens. They are still best represented as line drawings, but photography has gradually begun to dominate butterfly books, as you’ll see here. I prefer paintings and drawings myself. There’s a magic to art that resonates with the magic of butterflies, and true art has survived better in natural history illustration than it has in many other places. And Dunbar even has space to discuss butterflies on cigarette cards and wall-charts. He knows his subject inside out and this book about butterfly books proves it.

My German is weak, my Georgian is weaker, so I decided to improve both by getting this German-Georgian dictionary and using it with a German-English dictionary. My plan is working, but the dictionary wasn’t as comprehensive as I hoped. For example, if you look up Gott in the Deutsch-Georgisch section, you get ღმერთი ghmerti, but you aren’t told that the irregular genitive is ღვთის ghvtis. Nor does that appear in the Georgisch-Deutsch section under ღმერთი ghmerti.

You could spot it from the entry for Gottesmutter, “God-mother”, which is translated as ღვთისმშობელი ghvtismshobeli (literally “God’s-bearer”), but you won’t get help like that with many other irregular words. The entries and definitions are minimal and sometimes the dictionary only works one way. Ketzer, or “heretic”, is translated as მწვალებელი mts’valebeli and ერეტიკოსი eret’ik’osi, but those words don’t appear in the Georgisch-Deutsch section. And although the Georgisch-Deutsch section has წალდი ts’aldi, translated Axt or “axe”, if you look under Axt in the Deutsch-Georgisch section, all you get is ცული tsuli.

Beside that, there are no verb tables or entries for morphemes (like “un-” or “-less”), as opposed to full words, and you won’t get much help with the subtleties of verbal prefixes. But a minimal German-Georgian dictionary has advantages over a comprehensive English-Georgian one. It’s more mental exercise, more fun and doesn’t have space to transliterate the Georgian, so you get more practise in reading it.

And physical dictionaries have advantages over electronic ones. You spot things by chance in a real dictionary and you make connections you might not otherwise make. For example, if you look up the Georgian for “night”, you might get a small but interesting insight into the spirit of the language:

ღამე, Nacht f […]

ღამურა, Fledermaus f

Georgian for “night” is ghame and Georgian for “bat” is ghamura. And Fledermaus, “flittermouse”, is an insight into German, if it isn’t your mother-tongue. So is Feuerstein, “fire-stone”, for “flint”. I learned Feuerstein from a German-English dictionary, but I was using that book only because I was using this one. I’d now like to get a Russian-Georgian dictionary too. Using one would be a bit like playing chess with chopsticks, but you can learn better when you make things harder for yourself.